On the last day of my Patagonia photo tour, we spotted a mated pair of pumas -- mountain lions. It was very exciting to see them, but they were far from the road -- at least a third of a mile -- and were tiny in the frame. I took this with a 500mm telephoto plus a 1.4x teleconverter, giving me 700mm of focal length. The original size of the frame was 57 megs (produced by the Canon 1Dx Mark II at 20.8 megapixels), and the image you see here was cropped down to 7.2 megs. It was lightly raining and the ambient light was quite low, so I shot with 2500 ISO. The shutter speed was 1/250 at f/8, and I hand held the lens using image stabilization. The shutter should have been faster, but given the amount I knew I had to crop this, I didn't want to use a higher ISO due to the degradation of quality that would be pronounced with a serious crop. I used Neat Image software to mitigate the noise, and it did a very good job. The significant cropping I did wasn't ideal, of course, but otherwise the diminutive size of the cats would have made the image pointless. I didn't take the time to set up a tripod because I was afraid I'd lose the opportunity to get this picture.
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